Uploading Your Digital Self Could Make You Live Forever

Uploading Digital Personalities Topic of Global Futures Congress

Uploading your personality could be possible with the Singularity. Have you heard of the Singularity yet? If you’re a college student and definitely if you’re a millennial, you should know about this predicted event set to occur in 2045 where technology is expected to surpass human brainpower to create a type of superintelligence. At this point, human brains and computer hard drives are expected to be uploaded as one, the eponymous “singularity.”

This topic was the main subject of the Global Futures 2045 International Congress, a futuristic conference held from June 14-15 in New York City initiated by Russian multi-millionaire Dmitry Itskov. Walking a line between hardcore science and sci-fi, a group of scientific luminaries and spiritual leaders gave talks on several “transhumanist” subtopics.

Based on the exponential movement Moore’s law, which says computer processing power doubles every two years, this event and uploading are seemingly unavoidable. Ray Kurzweil, an inventor, futurist, and current director of engineering at Google who came up with this concept of the singularity, presented evidence like the advances of genetic sequencing and 3D printing to back his case.

Going further, Itskov and other transhumanists believe that we could eventually cheat death by uploading our minds to a computer, discarding the need for a biological body. (Calling Descartes or The Matrix anyone?) This made the conference quite surreal when Martine Rothblatt—lawyer, author and entrepreneur—discussed this in her talk “The Purpose of Biotechnology is the End of Death.”

Rothblatt introduced the concept of “mindclones,” which are uploaded, digital versions of humans that could live forever and be collected into a “mindfile,” an online repository of personalities. (Get started on this Zuckerburg, MindFile is Facebook for mid-21st century). But would an uploaded mindclone be alive? That’s dependent on her definition, which basically concludes that the mind needn’t be embedded in a physical body, and an uploaded personality could be equaled to software or hardware. But the debate rages on, so hurry up with LGBT matters, Congress, because mindclone civil rights are coming up fast.

But even if we are able to upload our mindclones and “exist” in a mindfile, will we still have to go to work and worry about money? And how would we be governed and how frighteningly simple will it be to control this population? Keep all this in mind the next time you hear the term “Singularity.”